Last month, when I read that Atlantic puffins were threatened, I had an immediate and visceral reaction. It wasn’t to form a Pro-Puffin League, or to post something about saving the puffins on Facebook, or to organize a Puffin Power March on Washington. It was instead to remember the moment on that small boat off the rocky, wind-blown coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton when I first saw these strange, spectacular, and, by human standards, silly-looking birds. It was a moment of surprise, intense and joyful as new sightings tend to be, and as I read about the puffins’ demise it came back to me as if it were happening again, right then and there. It had been an oddly personal encounter—though not for the birds of course: if I was anything to them it was an annoyance, some guy with binoculars staring them down. But to me they were something else entirely.

One thing they were was an invitation into a new world, and a new way of thinking about this one. I’m currently reading Roger Tory Peterson, a terrific biography by Douglas Carlson. Peterson, the founding father of modern birding and the creator of the first real birders’ field guides, grew up wandering the woods near Jamestown, New York, and from an early age took a kind of instinctive, wild joy in birds. Born in 1908, Peterson’s joy would become his profession, despite his immigrant father’s dismay that his son wasted all his time on a hobby that would never amount to everything. Enraptured, Peterson responded to the birds he saw by filling notebooks with observations, drawing and painting them, and photographing them with an ancient, unwieldy camera.

What is it about birds that captures so many of us? That moment of flight, maybe: a moment that combines the artistic and the athletic, as well as surprise. The discovery of worlds beyond the troubling human world. And the sheer vicarious pleasure of briefly getting outside of oneself.

Peterson had certainly experienced all this and more when he moved to New York City to attend art school in 1926. There he fell in with the legendary Bronx County Bird Club and their charismatic leader, Ludlow Griscom. Charging around New York to spot birds on beaches and parks and dumps, Griscom and Peterson were in the midst of a birding revolution. Before them, the way to study a bird was “in hand,” which is to say: after you had shot it. But these new birders were after something different. They called what they were looking for “field marks,” and they could see them through binoculars, often from great distances.

Before Peterson and Griscom’s time, dusty tomes filled with autopsy-inspired descriptions of birds (yet amazingly very few pictures of them) had been the norm. In 1934, the publication of Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds would change all that. Here, finally, was a book meant to be taken into the field, packed with clear and simple illustrations that pointed out the identifying characteristics birders should always be looking for. Notably, Peterson didn’t group birds taxonomically—which was how it had always been done before—but rather with other, similar-looking birds, in order to highlight subtle distinctions.

Peterson helped turn an activity that had previously been thought of as laborious into one that was fun. Birding was now freed from the stuffy academic halls, and the shift was reflected in the high-spirited, athletic way that Peterson and his fellow Bronx birders went chasing after the objects of their obsession, a mood they passed along to others during events like their Christmas Bird Counts and “Big Day” birding competitions. Peterson’s field guides would go on to sell more than 20 million copies.

But something else was happening back then, too. Douglas Carlson argues—persuasively, I think—that without Peterson’s field guides, we wouldn’t have ended up with Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring, or, for that matter, the modern environmental movement as we know it. He quotes David Clapp, a director of sanctuaries for the Massachusetts Audubon Society: “Those field guides opened a door, and culturally all of America walked through it. By becoming aware of birds, we essentially opened up all of our environmental thinking.” Noble Proctor, an ornithologist who has written several well-received guidebooks of his own, goes a step further: “It was [Peterson’s] field guides that really started the conservation movement. Through the field guides, people obtained the knowledge to identify the plants and animals and birds. Before you can go out and save anything, you have to know what it is.”

The shift in consciousness that signified the birth of modern environmentalism could only have taken place, in other words, once the lesson Peterson had absorbed as a bird-obsessed young man—what Carlson has called “a more biocentric understanding of his place in the natural world”—was absorbed by others.

"To expect youngsters to become ‘instant environmentalists’ is presumptuous."

Whatever Peterson’s larger impact on the environmental movement, there’s little question about how his personal environmental ethic developed. Carlson writes that “like everything else in his life, [it] began and ended with birds.” Once you get to know someone it becomes a little harder to stand idly by as their homes are destroyed and their populations decimated. In this way, many individuals re-live Peterson’s evolution, his movement from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. And from apathy to concern.

I think of my friend Freddy Santana Rodriguez, whom I met when I followed ospreys that were migrating down through Cuba. As a young man Freddy took deep pleasure in the vast and varied bird life of his home island. His life changed one day in 1996, when he discovered a dead male osprey with a band on his leg in the area near his home in Santiago de Cuba. Through the information on the osprey’s band, Rodriguez got in touch with Keith Bildstein, the director of conservation science at Hawk Mountain, a Pennsylvania site well-known among observers of raptor migration. Freddy’s find would lead to his becoming the first Cuban intern at Hawk Mountain; when he returned to his home country, he would go on to establish a site for observing migrating ospreys on la Gran Piedra, a rock outcropping in eastern Cuba’s Sierra Maestre mountain range.

From the day he discovered that osprey, Freddy tied his own life to that of the birds he loved. He has told me that some of his happiest moments have been watching the annual migration of ospreys through the mountains each fall, shining overhead like a suspended black-and-white river. Naturally, as he spent more time with them, Freddy began wanting not merely to study but to protect these birds—to educate his countrymen about them, to speak out against hunting and the destruction of those natural places in Cuba that serve as pit stops on the birds’ migratory route.

But for Freddy, the activism came later. First, he told me, there was just the joy of seeing these wild, beautiful creatures in flight.

Which brings me, finally, back to puffins. To see them and know them a little is to feel pain at the idea that they’re in peril. As the Associated Press’s Clarke Canfield wrote in the article I mention earlier, Atlantic puffins have been “dying of starvation and losing body weight, possibly because of shifting fish populations as ocean temperatures rise, according to scientists.” Canfield goes on to note that “[d]ozens of emaciated birds were found washed ashore in Massachusetts and Bermuda this past winter, likely victims of starvation.” Puffins have always fed their young herring, but with that population of fish dwindling, puffin parents have tried to substitute butterfish, which their young can’t seem to swallow.

With a little digging, I uncovered the name of Steve Kress, who is the Puffin man for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.I was joking earlier when I wrote about the Pro Puffin League and the Puffin Power March—but it turns out I wasn’t far off. Under Steve’s guidance, the National Audubon Society started Project Puffin back in 1973, in an effort to learn how puffins might be restored to their historic nesting islands in the Gulf of Maine. Since then, Steve has centered his life on learning about and protecting this little bird that, to non-birders, looks like a tiny squeak-toy penguin. When I wrote to ask him how this had come to pass, here’s how he responded:

In brief, my first bird experience was with a flicker. Mine was feeding on the lawn outside my 4th grade classroom. My teacher challenged the group to identify it. I pawed through a copy of the Golden Guide to Birds and found the bird, based on its white rump and habits. This was an “eye-opener”—and I suspect you will find that most ornithologists today can trace their beginning passion to such a one-on-one experience. This led to my interest in joining a local kids naturalist club at the Columbus, Ohio, metro parks. The metro parks were allied with the Columbus Audubon Society, and this led me to the Audubon summer camps.

One important thing to note is that the passion that turned into Steve’s career began with fun—with his teacher making a game out of it. Another is something that he didn’t mention in his e-mail, but that I found on his website: while his interest grew from that initial spark, the interest quickly turned into concern. Steve became upset when he saw the natural habitat in his hometown of Columbus being destroyed for suburbia and shopping malls, and vowed to do something about it.

That’s how it went for Roger Tory Peterson, how it went for Freddy Rodriguez, how it goes for so many. It starts with loving the birds. And often it ends with fighting for them.

I’ll let Peterson have the last word:

“In my opinion, kids, especially the younger ones, do not start with an ecological concept. They acquire one by using springboards such as birds, plants, or mammals. To expect youngsters to become ‘instant environmentalists’ is presumptuous. … Feelings must come first, then names of wild things, then where they live, what they do. Concepts follow. …There is no substitute for substance and passion.”

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David Gessner is the author of eight books, including My Green Manifesto and The Tarball Chronicles, both of which grew out of reporting for OnEarth. He has won the John Burroughs award for best natural history essay, taught environmental writing at Harvard, and founded the literary journal Ecotone. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. MORE STORIES ➔

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Andrea wrote on July 25, 2013 - 12:33

What a great article. I was also introduced to the wonderful world of birding thru Peterson's Guide

Anonymous User wrote on August 6, 2013 - 20:36

I was reminded of the plight of the puffins while reading The Great Auk by Allan W Eckert. A memorable read about a species driven to extinction by man.

Anonymous User wrote on August 8, 2013 - 08:40

The earth was made for man not man for the earth, you must understand that most of the people you will meet in your life are going to hell for eternity, God has said he will roll up the heavens and the earth like a cloth and create a new heaven and a new earth, so if somebody tells you they can save the earth they are deceived. So you have to understand environmentalism is just the latest false religion as wide and broad is the road that leads to destruction and straight and narrow is the path that leads to life and you had better be on that path otherwise your eternal destruction is assured.

Issyco wrote on August 16, 2013 - 17:11

And whatever other gibberish you are feeding us! What a bunch of hogwash!!! Man has already destroyed the Planet Earth with his insatiable greed for first land, then oil, and always money. My prayer is that when man has finished with her, there will still be enough wild things left for our Mother Earth to start anew. Only without man can this happen. GMOs will be the end of us and many species of plants and animals too.

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